identify characters embedded in a image

[rahulsundar_007]

hi

i need to identify characters in a image file. for example to identify words in a windows tooltip picture(jpeg,bmp,gif). can anyone help me out to do it using c#

- rahul

[ddanbe]

IMHO characters in a bitmap or jpeg or whatever consist of colored pixels, just like the rest of the image. In a text there is a relation of the characters with some kind of code like ASCII, you don't have that in an image.

[rahulsundar_007]

you are right, but what i was looking for is ....

assume if the background color is grey. having this is there any tool which identifies english characters on a image.

- rahul

[sknake]

Yes there is. The technology is called "OCR" or "Optical Character Recoginition". I think you can find some open source libs on the internet that do OCR. I personally use Atalasoft for OCR/Barcode recognition but you have to buy their software: http://www.atalasoft.com/products/dotimage/ocr/default.aspx

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=.NET+OCR&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g9
http://www.ocrtools.com/fi/Download.aspx
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr/
http://www.freeocr.net/

[ddanbe]

Aaaarrgg! And then to know I worked with such tools some 20 years ago :@ Hope they have improved, in these days they were not that optimal. I guess my brain is not improving and going in the opposite direction :(

[sknake]

From my experience they probably have not improved :P

I have had a hell of a time working with TWAIN, OCR, and Barcode Recoginition libraries. I really don't care to ever mess with that code again...